College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

Clare Gibson's Hidden Life of Ancient Egypt has several pictures of people wearing incense cones on their heads (though she isn't clear about what keeps them from falling off). None of them look quite like the green whatsit on Ankh-af-na-khonsu's head. She says, "Well-to-do ancient Egyptians wore blocks of solidified, fragrant incense in this way on both festive and solemn significant occasions."

I think the green thing on top of his head (is that what you're talking about?) is perfumed oil not a hat.

I've always been fascinated by these "languages" that popped up in the Vision and the Voice and apparently nowhere else. They have a very evocative beauty, I think.

I suppose Crowley "translated" them the same way he "restored" and interpreted the barbarous words of Liber Samekh -- he sought resemblances with words in Greek or Hebrew, or else interpreted them qabalistically. For example, "mu" = "silence" resembles the Greek root "mu" meaning "mystery". "Telai" = "cease" and maybe "tulu" = "attain" resemble Greek "telos", meaning "completion, goal". "Melai" = "sweet" and "malai" = "honey" resemble Greek "meli" and Latin "mel", both meaning "honey. "A" = "air" because of its qabalistic association, as "u" = "initiation" because it is the letter of The Hierophant.

@ThelemicMage said

"I am interested in other's views on purifying the body with spiritual cleansing, and how dramatic it can be."

Well, I've found that a half hour or more of asana will clear my sinuses.
More seriously, Philip Kapleau in The Three Pillars of Zen has stories of people who, after practicing rigorously at a Zen retreat, found that persistent health problems like asthma had gone away. I'd always wondered how Crowley, with his asthma, could have pursued yoga and other practices as he did, but maybe the discipline of meditation actually has this health benefit.

In your "Eras in the Aeon of Horus", you ask, "2012 (IV20): ???What breakthrough shall we create?"

In hindsight, what do you think fit the bill? The so-called Arab Spring fits the theme of transition. The discovery of the Higgs boson not so much. Anything else 2012 will be noted for?

You might be interested Peter Adamson's take on the origins of Kabbalah. Adamson is a scholar in the history of philosophy, and he takes up Kabbalah in episode 168 of his excellent podcast series, "The History of Philosophy without any Gaps."

historyofphilosophy.net/kabbala

Key soundbite: "The stuff makes Iamblichus look like Bertrand Russell."

Just a thought (undoubtedly wrong) to add to the confusion:
I'd always puzzled over the way the verse suggests you are supposed to choose one kind of love over the other. However you interpret them, dove and serpent look like a yin-yang complementarity and presumably you'd need both in equal degree. (For example, "Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour" employs both bird and snake equally.) Then it occurred to me that I was trying to look too deeply and that the meaning might be more superficial. If a real dove and a real serpent encountered, I'd bet on the serpent to at least frighten the dove away. Maybe the dove-love is the sort of weak, soft, namby-pamby mercy and pity the book is always condemning, and the serpent love is a stronger, scarier, "Love one another with burning hearts" variety.

@Jim Eshelman said

"That is: By their fruits (and nuts!) ye shall know them."

I wouldn't be too judgemental about the nuts. Even Crowley had a few of those.

I can't sit in the "Dragon" or any cross-legged position for more than about 20 minutes without my legs becoming completely numb. A meditation bench was the solution. Some people are of the opinion that this is "cheating", but I think it's no more so than using a chair for the "God" position.

I suppose any artist, to the extent that the artist is true to his or her inner light, is "hinting at important concepts and works of proper Magick."

Lovecraft himself, though, would probably not have agreed with you, as he was very skeptical of the occult. At one point, he and that famous debunker of things mystical, Harry Houdini, talked about writing a book debunking spiritualism, astrology, and other superstitions. Sadly, they never embarked on the project.

Here's the link to the Datura Press store: daturapress.com/index.php/book-store

In the Preface, you say, "I love anthology volumes. ... Dolores Ashcroft Nowicki's edited compilations ... are among the best." Are you referring to the Anthology of Occult Wisdom series that Datura Press has been quietly releasing? If so, I'm glad to see that someone outside Dolores's immediate sphere enjoys these. I've been trying to push them on my friends without much success.

A bit late, but here's a nice essay on what "theurgy" means: www.jwmt.org/v3n24/feliciano.html.

@Jim Eshelman said

"In today's NY Times, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has documented a new that people who practice substantially the methods recommended by Abramelin will obtain results substantially the same as those the same as those predicted by Abramelin.

www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/opinion/is-that-god-talking.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

While many of the results are banal, their character is much the same as one expects from the opening level of HGA phenomena. I'm taken with how the author's language resembles Karl Germer's remark, "Intense practices and invocations make the soul capable to react and understand the language of the HGA better and clearer.""

(First, a digression. Reading Luhrmann's book has opened my eyes to the existence of a major development in American Protestant Xianity of which I was unaware, that is neither the Protestantism in which I was raised nor the crusty fundamentalism that has such a depressingly great influence on American politics. These new trends have almost no continuity with traditional Xianities, despite their emphasis on the Bible, and I would describe them as the New Age (both the best and the worst of it) + Jesus.)

There's a passage in When God Talks Back (p. 121) where Luhrman describes how members of the churches she studied would experience a transition from verbal prayer to a nonverbal prayer. "'I always start off talking,' Rachel said, 'but then you get into this place where you just feel so connected, and then your thoughts are flowing into God and his response is flowing into you, and then even that gets blurry and you just feel this oneness. And that feels good.'"

This reminds me strikingly of Molinos. Because I am a spiritual snob, my reaction is to suppose that these Xians are only experiencing a kind of emotional exuberence, a mere parody of a true spiritual exaltation. But due to my lifelong habit of always contradicting my own thoughts, I must wonder if in fact either (1) these new Xians really are experiencing the spiritual transports of which Molinos writes and my reaction is just sour grapes, or (2) the supposed spiritual transports of Molinos were merely a kind of emotional exuberance of no significance, and there is nothing to this mysticism stuff after all.

There is in fact an edition of Molinos produced by and for these new Xians. (I haven't read it; I just now ordered a copy.) I'm told it does violence to the source, omitting large sections and dumbing down the rest. Now I'm interested to see for myself.

@Jim Eshelman said

"The Aeon of Osiris was that period of history when the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human has been Ruach, or ego-consciousness. (Being closer to us in history, we can see more finely its gradual development. Besides the accelerating urbanization and primitive technology, we can see 5th C. BCE Greece as a critical time when the architecture of the Ruach was well articulated. We can see late 1st Millennium times when important legends showed a young, underdeveloped ego-center, and later times when the hero figures matured. Then, probably about the time of the Magna Carta, we can see the "Act III" of its development in the explosive march of liberty, technology, etc.

The Aeon of Horus, which began in or near 1904, is that period of time within which the baseline level of functioning of the typical adult human will emerge as Neshamah, or superconsciousness."

My new word today is "dianoetic." Our Father Iamblichus says (De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum, III, III), "When we are awake we employ, for the most part, the life which is common with the body. except when we separate ourselves entirely from it by pure intellectual and dianoetic energies."

The Old Timers (from say the beginning of Hellenic philosophy to the first few centuries AD) used to speak in glowing terms of what they called Reason or Intellect. The Platonists, Gnostics, and Neoplatonists used the Greek term nous, which is variously translated "reason," "mind," or "intellect," and spoke glowingly of it as being the next best thing to God. I've always assumed they were really talking about Neshamah or Binah, or maybe even Chokmah, because they spoke of it as a special state of consciousness that was far-removed from ordinary life.

But maybe they really did mean "intellect," more-or-less as we mean the word today. My dictionary says "dianoetic" means discerned by reason as opposed to intuition; so dianoetic energies would pertain to self-consciousness, not super-consciousness. At that stage of the Aeon of Osiris, could it be that a purified form of the consciousness that you and I live in every day seemed Godlike?

The relationship between perception and reality may be more subtle that we suspect, and calling all perception hallucinatory may make a valid metaphysical point, but it casts too wide a net for ordinary conversation. It makes sense to distinguish ordinary perception from hallucination, or else the word hallucination is not useful.

Or to take a different tack, and allude again to Sach's book, there are various types of hallucination. So if it makes you happy to call the ordinary waking perception of a couch hallucination, then fine, but you have to recognize that it is of a different kind -- it has distinct characteristics and a different neurological cause -- from, say, the hallucinations caused by macular degeneration, those we call hypnogogic imagery, those associated with schizophrenia, the boring ear-ringing called tinnitus, etc.

@Jim Eshelman said

"We can neutrally describe them as "auditory hallucinations""

I first learned about Luhrmann's work from a mention in Oliver Sachs's newish book Hallucinations. One point Sachs makes is that hallucinations of various sorts are far more common that we would think, but that people are afraid to mention them even to their doctors (perhaps especially to their doctors) for fear of being thought crazy.

@Jim Eshelman said

"PS - There is no fixed "place" or stage where this disclosure occurs. I've known adepts who received the name on the first occasion of full K&C. I knew mine by about half-way to that goal, i.e., by early in 3=8; and I've known others who received the name at a similar early stage."

It's interesting that Crowley didn't get the name of his HGA all at once. He got the name "Aiwass" when the Book of the Law was revealed, but he didn't know that this was his HGA. Then, he wasn't sure how to spell it, so he didn't really know what formula it represented. Early on, he found a spelling that equaled 78 and worked with that. Then he found a spelling that was 418. Only after quite a few years did he discover, in a striking "synchronicity," a spelling that equaled 93. Aiwass was able to use this name to communicate different ideas to his Holy Guarded Human at different times over a number of years, presumably just when they were needed.

@Ash said

"Fantasy? Why would Heru-Ra-Ha bring us fantasy? Is there an antiquated or obscure meaning I'm missing to this word?"

Yes, it means imagination, the ability to create mental imagery. (It's still an odd word in this context, IMO, but the writer was obviously into alliteration here.)

It's a symbol of meditation - the mind trying to grasp itself.