The sacred beetles of Ra-Hoor-Khuit
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For perfume mix meal & honey & thick leavings of red wine: then oil of Abramelin and olive oil, and afterward soften & smooth down with rich fresh blood.
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The best blood is of the moon, monthly: then the fresh blood of a child, or dropping from the host of heaven: then of enemies; then of the priest or of the worshippers: last of some beast, no matter what.
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This burn: of this make cakes & eat unto me. This hath also another use; let it be laid before me, and kept thick with perfumes of your orison: it shall become full of beetles as it were and creeping things sacred unto me.
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These slay, naming your enemies; & they shall fall before you.
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Also these shall breed lust & power of lust in you at the eating thereof.
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Also ye shall be strong in war.
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Moreover, be they long kept, it is better; for they swell with my force. All before me.
Hey guys. You'll have to forgive the newb questions here...
but herein we seemingly have a very clear 'recipe'. I'm just curious if anyone has done this to the point of the appearance of 'creeping things'... and has anyone ever eaten the beetles - as it seems to suggest?
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The beetles remind me of hard tack. The civil war soldiers were gives really hard biscuits of flour, they has to be softened to eat them. Well, there is no protein or other nutrient in these, so the only nutritional value they got from it was bull weevil larva that dug into them.
Maybe the burnt residue should be made into hard tack, then softened with blood, and eaten once beetle larva infest them?
As such certainly did strengthen the soldiers for battle.
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I may just be rationalizing to avoid breeding and eating beetles, but it always sounds to me as if two different sets of instructions are being given.
One is for baking cakes of light and eating them.
Another is for breading some beetles with some dreadful batter, and killing them in a kind of sympathetic magick ritual.
And you have a verse with an ambiguous "they" pronoun, which talks about eating, and could either be referring to the cakes or the beetles. Either way, it's a secondary use of the recipe. The prime use is still as a Eucharist, and it's the only use I've personally used.
Separately, I've also seen beetles in the house after a batch of C's o' L. I squished them and named abstract concepts I was struggling against/with. If you're going to squish a beetle, it's kind of nice to give his little bug life a nice purpose.
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I've never worked with cakes of light, but heard stories of other Thelemite using them as instructed in Liber Al with effective results. The only way to find out is by trying it yourself. But I always understood these verses to be referring to only cakes of light, not two types of cake. The cakes are to be placed on the altar before the Stele of Revealing and prayers made. If successful, beetles should show up on the cakes.
Incidentally, speaking of breeding lust and power of lust, the blister beetle is an extremely strong aphrodisiac. So if any show up on the cakes of light, you know what you're looking at.