The Three Aeons
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[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
@Orione said
"aLL_seEIng_eYe, the way I learnt this (but I learnt it as a matter of fact and not really as a theory, so I don't know where these facts come from and how well-researched they are) is that children under the age of 2.5 to 3 have not yet developed a sense of self. As babies they consider themselves as part of the whole of existence and only slowly begin to differentiate between themselves and the world. Only after a few months will they understand they are not the same entity as their mother and will get seperation anxiety, for example. Kids up to the age of 2.5/3 also refer to themselves in the third person. "Mike wants milk" not "I want milk". Only at the age of 2.5/3 do they start to see themselves as real selves and from then on they will start to collect self-related memories. It is also the age at which kids start to understand their gender-identity.
It's not that kids younger than that don't remember things - they do. And it is even likely that those baby memories are stored somewhere. For example - abused kids do sometimes have mental scars from the abuse of the time before 2.5/3 but will not be able to tell a coherent story about it. We can't relate to these 'memories' in the way we can relate to our other memories, so it is difficult and different to 'remember' them.It's very interesting to relate this to the aeons!"
Yes Orione we are effectually saying the same thing; I equate "separate-self" and"self-relatedness" to the "linear-mind" since the self is now the "point of reference"(Hadit as opposed to Nuit). and yes i am just a little less than 2.5 years older than my brother,so the theory seems valid, I came to the same conclusion without being aware of it. often wonder whether that is actually a lower state of consciousness though?? sometimes i think the contrary is true.
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
@gmugmble said
"Some readers of your book will be taking for granted a common view that the Aeons of Isis, Osiris, and Horus correspond respectively to the astrological ages of Aries, Pisces, and Aquarius. Even Crowley, though he was vague about the matter, seems to have believed that an "aeon" was a 2000-year affair. You might want, at least in a footnote, to acknowledge that view and state that you disagree."
Thanks. I'll think about that one.
The relationship is so far and so distant that I've been preferring to handle it by ignoring it completely - not even planting in anyone's mind that there could be a relationship. But you may be right concerning those in whose minds this already exists. I'll think about that.
(Oh, I just remembered where it's somewhat quietly covered: In the glossary!)
Yeah, I'll probably add a footnote at the point where I used "ages."
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
I need to get my hands on this book of yours when it comes out, JAE.
Reading the section regarding the (eventual) baseline level of functioning in each Aeon, does this mean that when the Aeon of Hrumachis truly gets going, the baseline level of functioning will shift to Chiah, and will be Iechidah when the fifth Aeon is fully developed? -
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
Yeah, and the way we talk about how only the elite used to know how to read and write back in ancient civilizations.... that's how they'll talk about us.
"Back in the 21st century, attaining to K&CHGA (or whatever term they'll call it - maybe "basic individualization" or "basic spiritualcy" lol) was the equivalent of a PhD; only the elite geniuses ever attained it."
And the junior high students will guffaw, recalling that they attained K&CHGA back in 2nd grade.
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
Interesting introduction. I did some research into Crowley's conception of aeons, trying to pinpoint it down to exact periods and dates, but I never arrived at a satisfactory answer. But I did notice one thing about his formulation. It places the subject at the center of all reality - Mommy, Daddy, ME!
I am intrigued by the thought that the Aeon of Horus will spread through intuition rather than intellect. I would like to hear more about this "sympathetic exposure".
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
Kinda like contact high
It's mentioned earlier in the Introduction to the book. Basically, reading the remainder of the book and visualizing what you read will activate parts of the brain not usually used by most people. As a result, those parts become more active and integrated. Reading the book, therefore, is a type of initiation.
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
@Jim Eshelman said
"Reading the book, therefore, is a type of initiation."
Ok I'm sold.
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
@AvshalomBinyamin said
"It might not fit within the parameters of what you are doing with the new book, but I'd love to see some mapping of these aeons and stages of consciousness to events in civilization and mythology - tool use, agriculture, adam & eve, etc., etc.."
A couple of useful statistics - "tipping points" - might be of interest to you in the above.
As a preface, remember that I'm not seeing a time-based hard line or cut-off date. There is an extensive "blurring" transition. Some elements of ego-consciousness, for example, were surely extant while other characteristics were still substantially Isis-themed.
That said, I find the following interesting: Farming has been around quite a while - at least 10,000 years - but the "tipping point" of 5,000 years ago (about 3,000 BCE) marks the point where approximately half the human race had begun farming rather than just hunting-gathering. We might crudely take this as starting point of the Osiris Aeon. - The pattern unfurled from there, since the move from hunting-gathering to farming significantly altered the gender responsibilities, minimalizing the previously dominant female place in survival duties. It also allowed for the eventual building of communities, and it was in urbanization that the minimalizaton of women was accelerated.
Also, approximately 1900 CE was the point where half the human race had daily food. That's a huge shift! Think about it in terms of Abraham Maslow's models. That means that more humans than not were meeting one of the most crucial thresholds in deficit or survival needs. The emergence of the Horus Aeon at this juncture makes a great deal of sense!
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
Very interesting.
In line with this, it's interesting what a prominent role food plays in Genesis.
Adam & Eve - don't eat this, or you'll die (although with the sense that you'll be born to something new...)
Cain & Abel - animal offerings have more life force (and, therefore, value) than vegetable offerings (a hint at levels of consciousness: plant > animal > man)
Noah - don't eat blood
Abraham - use intelligence to become prosperous, and use that prosperity to show hospitality (in the form of food) and gain favor
Isaac - famine in the land
Jacob & Essau - selling a birthright for food, and later tricking the father for the blessing by bringing him his favorite dish
Joseph - sold to slavery in Egypt, where he becomes a chief administrator in times of famineYou can really see a progression of how humans handled food, and the benefits it gave them.
For example, Cain & Abel, and Jacob & Essau, seemed to be in some ways an analogous pair. In the first story, there's murder and a curse. But in the second story, the more civilized, less hairy, less hunter-gatherer type, is cleverer, and fares better.
Or the famine of Isaac's time. The shepherd nomad is less prepared to deal with famine. But by Joseph's time, the 'good guy' is helping plan for a 7-year drought.
Basically, food becomes currency, stored energy, and the ability to plan and scheme and leverage it is a major tactical advantage.
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
yesterdy, I was struck by this idea of simple correspondence:
Isis Aeon - Netzach
Osiris Aeon - Tiphareth
Horus Aeon - Geburahit shows the progressive evolution of consciousness up the Tree, and also directly points out to the characteristic major archetypes of every Aeon.
Solar qualities of Horus are inherent, they are that which is presupposed - he is the Child, the Third from the marriage of Opposites. but his Geburan & Martial qualities need to be emphasized now - and that's what we see in Liber L, Ch. III
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
I think that's mixing the sephiroth and the four worlds.
Nephesh, Yetzirah, and Briah seem a simpler correspondence to me...
But, if we're going with sephiroth, why not Malkuth, Yesod, Tiphareth?
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
@AvshalomBinyamin said
"
Nephesh, Yetzirah, and Briah seem a simpler correspondence to me..."yes, that deffinitely is the best 'fit'.
"if we're going with sephiroth, why not Malkuth, Yesod, Tiphareth?"
that sounds better because it's the Middle Pillar, and looks more 'natural' to map the collective evolution in that way on the Tree (i.e. only with Sephiroth, not Worlds). I would have to think about it deeper.
and maybe both are ok, having in mind that we can consider Netzach and Hod as polar reflections of the relationship between Yesod and Tiphareth... (and Geburah & Hesed as polarized higher octaves of Tiphareth -- which of course reflect the upper polar pair, supreme Mother and Father)some things that come to mind in 'defense' to Netzach-Tiphareth-Geburah correspondence:
Isis-7- love, devotion, collective consciousness, collective forms of god-worshiping; the essential idea for spiritual development was that of merging individual self with the whole (-as represented in the King/Emperor archetype, which is the symbol of the divine). 'I' is not divine, but 'we' make it possible for Human being to become divine...
graphic symbol: Ankh (or Venus-glyph)Osiris -6 - oneself made perfect, awakening of solar consciousness, 'I' is already 'we' and by giving up of the self completely, accepting death, the eternal life is recognized; ressurection; pisces-symbol (Nun - tha Path that connects Netzach and Tiphareth)...
graphic symbol: Cross, and cross circled (inside a circle) as a transitional form towards the next phase -->Horus - 5 - war, destruction of the old outgrown forms, spiritual development is now reached through
individuation - a necessary phase, because the main principle is action and thus the concrete..
graphic symbol: not known yet
I assume the traditional Sun-glyph (Bull's eye, the target...) is a transitional form, from 6 to 5.
also, Lamed is the Path, and many interesting ideas spring out of that correspondence... -
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
@danica said
"
Isis-7- love, devotion, collective consciousness, collective forms of god-worshiping; the essential idea for spiritual development was that of merging individual self with the whole (-as represented in the King/Emperor archetype, which is the symbol of the divine). 'I' is not divine, but 'we' make it possible for Human being to become divine...
graphic symbol: Ankh (or Venus-glyph)Osiris -6 - oneself made perfect, awakening of solar consciousness, 'I' is already 'we' and by giving up of the self completely, accepting death, the eternal life is recognized; ressurection; pisces-symbol (Nun - tha Path that connects Netzach and Tiphareth)...
graphic symbol: Cross, and cross circled (inside a circle) as a transitional form towards the next phase -->Horus - 5 - war, destruction of the old outgrown forms, spiritual development is now reached through
individuation - a necessary phase, because the main principle is action and thus the concrete..
graphic symbol: not known yet
I assume the traditional Sun-glyph (Bull's eye, the target...) is a transitional form, from 6 to 5.
also, Lamed is the Path, and many interesting ideas spring out of that correspondence..."Crowley makes a number of adjustments to the Old IAO formula. One is a re-arrangement into IOA:
Isis
Osiris
ApophisThe Apophis being associated with Horus.
Just another way to imagine the Aeonic progression as a cosmic magical formula?
love and will
-
[The following is an excerpt from the Introduction of my forthcoming book. I'm posting it for reader feedback, and because it might have intrinsic value. This comes immediately after a section on qabalistic psychology. - This is not a final draft. It's more of a polished first draft that still needs standard rewrite.]
THE THREE ÆONS
This model of the human psyche is useful in understanding another often obscure model, that of the three Æons.
At the time Crowley received The Book of the Law in 1904, some anthropologists had been focusing, for many years, on evidence of a matriarchal and matrilineal stage in human culture that had preceded the patriarchal and patrilineal form that had been principal especially in Europe for thousands of years.
Besides family structure and political and other social patterns believed to exist in this prior time, there were believed to be religious forms distinctive to the two broad time periods, as well as characteristic scientific models (particularly in astronomy) and commonplace theories of human reproduction.
Anthropology has gone further and has understood these things better in the century intervening. There were likely no discrete periods of time when all of these varied elements coexisted in quite the way previously thought. Nonetheless, it is important to understand how the theories of his day affected Crowley’s thinking, and also to understand what deeper actualities may have been working their way toward our conscious awareness in these earlier theories.
It is worth examining some of these patterns briefly.
Regarding procreation, common sense assures us that there surely was a time when the link between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was unknown. Early humans had sex, just as they did any number of other activities, and (with no necessary link observed) women got pregnant and delivered babies. During this time, everything from religious awe to pragmatic respect would have centered on woman in this role. Women did this amazing thing all by themselves!
At some point, though, the connection of pregnancy to sex would have been discovered, and this seems to have coincided with a shift of importance and social regard to the man. Creator gods replaced creator goddesses. The prevailing theory, then, was that men deposited children within women, whose job was “merely” to bear them nine months and deliver them whole. At Crowley’s birth, this was still the general scientific theory of reproduction, and I have seen one medical textbook as late as the 1920s asserting the same position.
However, by the dawn of the 20th Century there was an emerging theory gaining ground that both man and woman contributed parts of themselves equally in the creation of a child. That emerging knowledge would be pivotal in reformulating human thought and culture. The miracle was seen to be neither the man nor the woman alone, but their co-participation in the bringing forth of the real wonder, the child itself.
Regarding astronomy, we can track a different progression. There was a time when primitive humanity was most interested in the conditions of the earth – which certainly felt solid and unmoving! – and the wonders of the heavens (especially the nocturnal heavens) made them seem, most likely, the domains of gods. Astronomy was visual, not conceptual, which means that it was lunar rather than solar: You could see the stars at night and the Moon’s monthly passage across them, but could not witness the stars behind the Sun. As late as early first millennium CE, Egyptian astronomers (who were pretty sophisticated) were still recording primarily lunar passages, although they had learned to track the Sun indirectly – by noticing the stars opposite the Sun’s position, those that first rose at sunset. On the other hand, another way to identify these stars was a lunar way: the occurrence, within a particular star field, of the Full Moon.
In the last millennium or two BCE, though, other solar phenomena had started to garner attention. In particular, the Sun’s annual seasonal cycle, swinging from high declination at the summer solstice to walking low around the sky at the winter solstice, appeared to be the behavior of a great god of light that waxed and waned in strength. Even more so, the Sun’s daily behavior looked like the birthing, triumphing, and dying of heaven’s greatest lord, only to be resurrected afresh the next morning. It is no wonder, then, that humanity’s heroes and greatest gods became expressions of the Sun’s seasonal and diurnal behavior and, in time, a slain or dying god, resurrected to new life and bringing new light, became the religious embodiment of many cultures’ highest ideals.
Medieval and Renaissance astronomy brought an end to the astronomical theories on which these ideas were originally based, though it took well into the 18th Century for the fall of geocentrism and related scientific perspectives to find deep acceptance. By 1904, the world was ready for a new perspective.
Part of this new astronomical vision arose from a revolution in theoretical physics. In particular, 1904 also marked breakthroughs by Albert Einstein which led eventually to two competing and seemingly mutually exclusive models: a general theory of relativity which works only in very large realms (consider the Thelemic goddess Nuit who is the infinite circumference, the entirety of space) but collapses entirely in microscopic contexts; and the quantum theory that flourishes in the microscopic (consider the Thelemic god Hadit who is the infinitesimal point, the inmost seed-idea or point of view) yet collapses in the macroscopic. Soon the crusade began to find a unifying theory. 21st Century physics may have found this in string theory.
Regarding religion, especially in the West, patterns have unfolded more or less paralleling the astronomical theories mentioned above. In simple terms, primitive religious were primarily focused on earth and the Moon. A next phase of religions were primarily solar, and particularly celebrated by metaphor the annual and daily birth-death-resurrection cycle of the Sun. The religion which Liber Legis introduces for a new stage of human evolution is stellar; that is, it is superficially solar, but recognizes the Sun no longer as a ruling father, king, or god, but as simply one more star amid countless other stars.
All of this is terribly interesting to me and to many others. It shows many kinds of progression from an essentially feminine set of ideas to an essentially masculine set of ideas, to… something else. What it does not provide, however, is a coherent time line demarcating distinctive “æons” or zones of time, when all the feminine ideas lined up together, then were supplanted by the masculine ones.
In the late 19th and early 20th Century, though, the idea of a “matriarchal” time supplanted by a “patriarchy” was quite popular.
When the message of The Book of the Law began to sink in for Crowley, he began to conceive of human history in three phases, or æons. He had already been told that the New Æon just beginning was ruled by Horus, successor to his father Osiris. It became natural, therefore, to relate the prior phase to Horus’ mother (and Osiris’ mate), Isis. Thus, he began to write of the Æon of Isis, the Æon of Osiris, and the Æon of Horus, which we might more generically call the Age of the Mother, Age of the Father, and Age of the Child.
We will encounter these terms occasionally as we experience and analyze the visions of the 30 Æthyrs.
But is there any legitimacy to these ideas at all? If they are not reflective of a convergence of social, political, familial, scientific, religious, and other overlapping ideas, are they anything at all?
I think they are. There is a further history of evolution in the human species that these “æons” actually map. It is the progressive development of each successive stratum of the human psyche.
I define the Æon of Isis as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human was Nephesh, or what we now call subconsciousness. This is still the typical state of consciousness of non-domestic animals (and, mostly, of most domestic animals), and what we term the infantile level of consciousness in modern humans.
I define the Æon of Osiris as that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or what we now call ego-consciousness – that is, the “conscious” mind as it presently characterizes the typical psychologically healthy human adult. This period has also been characterized by the reactive suppression of things most associated with “Isis” stage consciousness, including women, children, and small animals (as emblematic of Nephesh consciousness), and substantial conscious suppression and minimization of our relationship to subconsciousness in general. (There is a long story to be told about the Osiris Æon and its unfolding. I need to save that for another time.)
I accept, based on evidence persuasive to me, that at some point around the start of the 20th Century humanity entered a third developmental phase. It is comfortable to me to accept that this is the Æon of Horus that Crowley said began in 1904, because that label and approximate timing match what I can observe from other channels. And, as you by now will have guessed, I define the Æon of Horus as that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or what we generally call superconsciousness. Obviously, we are not there yet! Similarly, even in recent centuries we can see significant development in human ego formation, so that the Osiris Æon must be viewed as having been a gradual unfolding. Political liberty, for example, is a relatively new idea, measurable in mere centuries. The King Arthur myth, roughly a thousand years old, is a remarkable example of a solar king (symbolic of our baseline ego development) who, in all his majesty and glory, is still but a boy (as was collective ego-development of his time), still struggling with his relationships with Isis Æon ideas.
The ego was not a new invention of consciousness anytime in the last several thousand years; however, it has undergone substantial maturation in only the last few centuries, implying that it was a relatively new “organ” in the recent millennia. Similarly, superconsciousness is not new to humanity. Books such as Maurice Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness and William James' Varieties of Religious Experience document important parts of its history. But, in the past, it has been proportionately rare. As the 20th Century began it seems that it was becoming a more common phenomenon.
We are looking at a “100th monkey” type of effect. Individual people have long awakened faculties of consciousness that typical people do not even know about, let alone use. But that does not mean that typical people do not have these faculties available to them. When a sufficient (small) percentage of people awaken these faculties, some mechanism – whether a shared band of consciousness, or the impact of social spread – will cause this awakening to spread radically across the face of humanity.
Should not our purpose, then, be to awaken these faculties within ourselves, and encourage it in others. As with most things in life that are within species capability – for example, being a su-perior athlete – the main requirement is persistent, ardent practice! Spirituality is like a muscle that can be trained. My earlier book, The Mystical & Magical System of the A.'.A.'., describes in detail one system of accomplishing this. The present book provides an-other way, which is the awakening of modes of consciousness by sympathetic exposure.
"Basically, food becomes currency, stored energy, and the ability to plan and scheme and leverage it is a major tactical advantage."
From my sources, currency originated as a symbol for food. Specifically when humans started to store food, the original clay coins were actual accountings of how much food was in the food storeage. It seems though that clay was very easy to counterfit, and thus rob the storehouses.
Thus began mankinds love of silver and gold......