College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

Paul Bauschatzs The Well and the Tree is one of the better sources for gaining an understanding of Wyrd in its original context. It does not have an association with Thelema or Will though it does have a close linguistic association with the idea of Becoming.

Edred was commenting that aspects of contemporary Chaos Magic have conceptual and practical resonances with what was called Seidr among Northern European groups. No other connection between these practices were being made.

Celtic material does not have its roots in the Germanic material, though the Anglo-Saxon lines of witchcraft do, Anglo-Saxons being Germanic people and all. This particular topic is the backbone of Edred's book The Witchdom of the True which deals with the Anglo-Saxon practices associated with the Wanes, the primary gods of the natural world.

The only material related to the Celtic cultural practices Edred has produced was a work titled The Book of Ogham. This book has since been reworked by a fellow named Michael Kelly and is worth a read if you have an interest in such things.

@Steven Cranmer said

"
As far as I know, there is no official way that a specific religion can be "recognized" by the U.S. government as a whole. (This is a wonderful thing, in my opinion!) If someone tried to implement such a system, I expect that First Amendment lawyers would be all over it in a heartbeat... "

501(c)3 incorporation as a Religious entity is the de facto means of doing this. Without such an incorporation First Amendment Rights may not be recognized for a movement or may be difficult to assert.

Simply put a religion without a recognized Church or Churches of some sort may find the free exercise of religion difficult and discrimination against them acceptable.

The title of this thread reminded me of something I've been wondering for a while.

Has anyone made a pdf of the holographic version of the original transcipts of Liber AL? If so is it available online?

@DavidH said

"
But I can't completely think this because they often use "Do what thou wilt..." in their letters, have a document which claims to explain Liber L, and the head of the Order claims to be the spiritual heir of Crowley."

A few things.

Dr. Michael Aqunio's personal Work does not equal "Temple of Set Doctrine" nor is a fair bit of it, from his experiments with the Enochian System to his Thelemic commentaries, considered foundational to the group. They are the Works, often interesting Works, of one member, held alongside numerous other Works by other members.

Additionally Dr. Aquino, while the founder of the Temple of Set, is not the "head of the Order." His last official possition ran from 2002 to 2004 when he served as High Priest for the last time to help institute a decentralization of the authority of that role before handing it over to another. At present he severs in no official position within the organization although he does act as a non-voting advisor to the group's board of directors.

What individuals Setians use in their writings/greetings/etc. is wholey at their own discression and not subject to any proscription or mandate.

"Isn't the Oak tree as a separate entity really just illusion? It will always NEED things not of itself to survive: Carbon Dioxide, water, the earth, etc., so it really is just part of the whole. no? We can say the earth ecosystem is ONE and the oak is a part of it, but then the earth is dependent on the sun, etc. etc."

Something can be fully whole while also being a part of something else. An atom is still a whole atom, unique unto itself even if it is a part of a larger unit such as a molecule for example.

This is a very interesting line of thought which branches out beyond our initial discussion, enough so that an independent thread might be in order. Before getting too far are you familiar at all with Ken Wilber's so-called Integral Model?

@DavidH said

"Do they believe that there are Black Brothers but just use a different definition of the Left Hand Path?"

While you'd probably get a number of different answers if you spoke with multiple Setians, in general the phenomena of the "Black Brother" as Crowley defined it, namely someone attmpeting to remain purely static without concern for personal or cosmic maintance certainly exists. Setian simply do not use the terminology for that condition.

" Am I wrong in that the object of the TOS is to develop the self to be self sufficient so as not to be "absorbed" in a return to the "source" and lose their individual identity?"

You are correct, but you may be framing things in a different manner.

To take a metaphor from Don Webb's *Uncle Setnakt's Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path * the acorn looking to become an oak in its own right must seek to become self-sufficient and not simply find itself rotting and re-absorbed as fertilizer for the established Oak that spawned it. In much the same way the Setian seeks to unfold and enfold the totality of their being as independent entities without a desire to be reabsorbed within the Source of Being itself. To do so would deminish the scope, manifestation and potential for Being within the Cosmos.

Much of this will make considerably more sense if you assume from the get go that the Temple of Set is a non-Crowleyian/Non-A.'.A.'. school and as such does not conform, nor seek to conform, to the Crowleyian Understandings or nomenclature. It is a thing unto itself.

@DavidH said

"Can you explain what is meant by the LEFT HAND PATH? I always thought of it as the path of the black brothers, and I know TOS refer to themselves as those of the Left Hand path. Can anyone explain the term?"

This is a rather condensed version, so some of the nuance will be lost.

Essentially the handedness metaphor, which appears in number of cultures but seems somewhat regular in Indo-european cultures, deals with the idea of there being things which are considred culturally correct and proper and those things that are considered improper, dangerous and to be avoided. "Right" tends to fit the former while "Left" the later.

The Left-Hand Path in this context is a means of spiritual transformation which involved the active engagement of those things considered improper, dangerous and to be avoided by one's host culture, not mearly for the kick of doing "dirty" things, but in order to shake one's self loose from the fetters such unexamined notions have.

Once one has freed themselves from these fetters the unleashed energies are then directed towards the unfolding of the Self-complex towards greater levels of personal and transpersonal integration, consciousness and capacity for action.

To extend the metaphor form earlier, it is the goal of the Left-hand Path to refine that light passing through the water, to remove any delusion that it is in fact one with the water and to learn more about what its true natuer and capacities are, on its own and in interaction with those things other then itself.

In a nutshell the Left-hand Path as understood and expressed within the Temple of Set is not the same as how that term was used by Aleister Crowley within the A.'.A.'. system nor is it meant to be. Crowley's use of the term is very specific to his own system and Understanding and also reflecting usages of the term among European magicians of the 19th and early 20th Century.

Make any sense?

@DavidH said

"The entire philosophy and practice of TOS is that of the Black Brothers in that they choose not to pour into Babalon after crossing the abyss, but they try to maintain a separate existence. "

Not really.

See Don Webb's Aleister Crowley: The Fire and the Force for what the Temple of Set is actually up to and how this course of ation does not in fact fit the "Black Brother" model that Crowley attempted to establish.

The Setian sets out to maintain their own Isolate Intellegence but this does not include shutting down from self-transformation to protect what is already established nor avoiding reciplocal maintance with the rest of reality as one would find in the Crowleyian Black Brothers.

"Their philosophy is also very dualistic in that they emphasize they are not part of "God" but separate from it, shown in their jewel symbol where the pentagram is inside the circle but not touching it, thus not dependent upon it. You can get the exact symbolism from their book, the Crystal Tablet. I am going off memory only, so if you have the quote, please include it."

The best way to think of how Setian view this sort of thing is through the image of light passing through a glass of water. The light (Isolate Intellegence) isn't the water (Objective Universe) nor can it be somehow transformed into it. Similarly the water, which is perfect in its own fashion, isn't light nor would much be gained by pretending that it was. Through their interaction however a number of novel things can take place which reveal more about the qualities of light and water and as such a need for this interaction, even if it's ultimate purpose (telos) may be mysterious at this time, exists.

@DavidH said

"Another thing they do, which I believe is very dangerous, is that in Magick they do not believe in any "protections" or banishing. They do not use circles, or other such devices before doing invocation/evocation. They believe they are part of these forces so why banish them."

Look into Ritner's Mechanics of Egyptian Magic sometime for an alternate interpretation of this sort of thing. The basic sense of it is that within the context of Egyptian Magic the notion of needing to create a temporary sacred space via ritual actions, something common to most Indo-European cultures and retained in the Golden Dawn system, was simply absent from their practice. The Temple of Set didn't set out to mimc this element in their practice but came to it in a more naturalistic fashion.

"But magick, IMHO, is like art...you need to start with a clean piece of paper before starting, thus banishings! You could grab an old newspaper and start drawing on that, but you'd probably end up with an incoherent mess."

I think you may be mistaking the abscence of GD style Banishing rituals for a lack of any ritual framing method. While hardly as elaborate as the GD system most Setian Workings follow or re-interpret a particular rubric as the opening and closing of their activities.

@Redd Fezz said

"I have just discovered that Stephen Flowers is not a reliable source, his PhD is a sham, basically, and most of his ideas can only be traced back to about the 1800's Germany."

Not true. He earned his PhD for a study titled Runes and Magic from the Germanic Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin, which was and is still one of the top Germanic Studies deparmtents in the US. As you are in NYC, you can find a copy of his dissertation in the Columbia Library if you're interested. The section on the so-called "Semiotic Theory of Magic" is most interesting even if you aren't terribly interested in Runes.

"This includes his guessed at "proto-Germanic" preferred names of the Elder Futhark."

Those aren't his guesses but rather the common reconstruction used by Linguists for determining the hypothesised "Proto-Germanic" language from which all alter Germanic languages descend.

"In conclusion: lock/delete thread (your call). This is a waste of brainpower."

No reason to lock or delete it.

To answer your original question, no Crowley never wrote on the topic of the Runes, either any of the three traditions or the late 19th Century syncratic Armanen tradition. His exposure to the Runes was likely minimal as he had no connections with the Ariosophic groups influences by Guido von List active in Germany during his life time nor was he much of a reader in German by his own admission.

There is no connection between Aiwass and the rune known as Eihwaz, either factually or magically. Speculation along those lines will yeild only subjective interpretations of little transpersonal value.

Just as an FYI the IOT as done by Carroll and Sherwin was little more then a tag name for themselves and their friends. It wouldn't be until the mid 80s, long after Sherwin moved on to other things, that the IOT would be recormed as the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros by Carroll and Frater VD.

Sherwin was an interesting character. His background was with Scientiology and Thelema while Carroll was more interested in trying to hammer out his own personal approach to magic which was definately flavored by Thelema and Spare as interpreted by Grant.

Chaos magic is a discipline and technique driven approach to practical magic adapatable to nearly any system of belief and metaphysical orientation. Most of the people who have been most influenced by the approach, and have in turn influenced it, do not refer to themselves as "Chaos Magicians" as their primary identity any more then a British novelist would refers to themselves as an "English Speaker."

"No. The chakras have always been locked into the underlying Masonic system (just consider the penal signs of the three Craft Degrees for starters)."

Seems like a little bit of a stretch, or simply a desire to read one symbolic set onto another, but I can understand the interpretation.

"With respect to the O.T.O., Crowley wrote the degree correspondences to the chakras in his personal copy of The Equinox and those marginalia (having been typed up by Germer) became the basis of 1970s attention."

I remember reading that Crowley found attributions but that he hadn't left anything in the way of details. Interesting to know that he had done degree attributions.

"For instance, it is public knowledge that the OTO Man of Earth Degrees are intended to open up or activate the major Cakkras. There are particular moments in these initiations which seem to many of us to be especially important in accomplishing this goal."

Not exactly my field of expertise, but wasn't the chakric material in relation to the OTO grades a Grady McMurtry addition to the system and not something found explicately in either Reuss or Crowley's presentations of the system?

Perhaps one of the reasons that Liber O as pushed as it is comes from the first practical requirement for engaging in the practice, namely

"Before entering upon any of these practices, the student should be in good health, and have attained a fair mastery of Asana, Pranayama and Dharana."

Most people do not approach the practice of Liber O with these preliminary skills in place and as such have to gain them along the way.