College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

@Aum418 said

"Another way to look at it is this way: how many people throughout history have attained without ceremonial magick? How many people attained before the large rise of ceremonial magick in the Victoria/Rennaissance era? The thousands and thousands of Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists... (it seems absurd to say none of these attained to the level of K&C of HGA which Crowley makes analogous to Union with God/Adi-Buddha, and union of Microcosm w/ Macrocosm, etc.)"

I agree with this entirely. One can go further, and say that many thousands of people have attained over a diversity of cultures and spiritual traditions without having heard of the Cup of Babalon, or the sexual Gnosis, or the Babe of the Abyss, or the City of Pyramids, etc. I don't think that Thelema can be taken out of context, which is its place in a diversity of spiritual disciplines and methods of attainment.

Staying with the Thelemic discipline for a moment, no I don't think that ceremonial magic(k) is a necessity for attaining the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. It's one amongst a variety of methods which might facilitate the experience or level of initiation, but the most crucial factor is a state of readiness or adhikara.

There's also the further question of what we mean by ceremonial magic(k) anyway. I have rarely dressed in a robe and utilised the weapons. For me, the gestures, the invocations and more crucially the visualisations (including the corollaries across the other senses) are the essence of ritual magic.

@Aum418 said

""The star that leads" is either Polaris the northern star (which lead sailors) but is most likely the Morning/Evening Star: Venus..."

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I was thinking more along the lines of "these are for the servants of the Star & the Snake" & "Every man and every woman is a star" & also "I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star..." - but Venus, as the esoteric sun, is a sufficient analogy...so is the Polaris! Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream

"A child's rhyme stuck in my head says that life is but a dream..." - MJK

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@augur said

"I think the core solution is that "there is no difference". In pretty much all principles Thelema is a meeting point of spiritual techonolgies. Especially in Crowley's work where there is literally a dense smattering of all the data that he could access at his time and place in the universe. I can envision choosing any particular religious path, gutting it of the unecessary elements (guilt, superiorty, entitlement, etc...), and applying "Do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will.", and having an effective path to enlightenment. The beauty of the Religio-Philosophical nature of Thelema, is that it is subjective to a particular experience, so there is no one method, pantheon, or symbol set that can possibly contain the essential core elements of a personal science. I guess beyond decoding the deities in the Liber AL.

Life, Love, Liberty, Light"

😱 Wow, I think you're right. At some point things get so confusing that is better to keep things simple and, like you say, realize that it's just a matter of gutting the unecessary elements, there is no "THE pantheon" or "THE mythology", it's up for the individual and that opens up to an infinite number of possibilities, infinite number of paths for each individual.

Thanks,
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@Steven Cranmer said

"
While I'm sure that this does happen, it feels "off-topic" as far as the specifically religious aspects of suffering that the New Aeon (to me) appears to specifically eliminate or supercede."

Ayn Rand does a great job of describing the dynamic of sacrifice in this sort of context (perhaps the only thing she does well) - as opposed to the world as inherent suffering sort of context. It's a primary theme of Atlas Shrugged. It was through this novel that I really began to understand how people make claims upon one another and demand sacrifice or use sacrifice to make those claims on one another. It doesn't operate on the cosmic scale that you see as primary to Liber L, but it's probably more real in our daily lives.

Agreed with all of you,
thank you Edward for your advice.

@Her said

"Most of the Liber designations are quite easy to work out but some are a little obscure. For example the well known Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae sub figura IV. Why O and 6? A possible connection with IAO and Tiphareth?"

It's more interesting when you consider Liber E and Liber O as a pair - 9 and 6, which I've always felt were references to Yesod and Tiphereth in a couple of different ways.