End as thou didst begin: The Star Ruby

Crowley’s Liber XXV, a ritual known as “The Star Ruby” and designed as a “new and more elaborate” ritual of the pentagram, concludes with the instruction to repeat the Qabalistic Cross and “end as thou didst begin.”

Opinions vary on the meaning of this phrase – whether it indicates that one should perform again the “exorcism” that begins the ritual or whether it is a redundant description of repeating the QC. Such details as these are rather irrelevant. But the importance of this phrase, “end as thou didst begin,” however, cuts to the very core of Thelemic philosophy and one of its central paradoxes: initiation fundamentally changes the individual, but it ultimately changes nothing at all.

We will explore the meaning of this enigmatic-sounding sentence in this post, which provides a full examination of The Star Ruby and the ways in which it complements and extends the LBRP, bringing the pentagram ritual further into alignment with Thelema.

Read on for more.

Dissenting Opinion?...What Dissenting Opinion?

There are some things that are just inevitable: death, taxes, the tides, the seasons, and…Los having his relevant and insightful posts rejected from religious blogs. Earlier this week, I got into a mini-exchange with occult author Donald Michael Kraig on this blog entry here. It forms an interesting extension of the discussion I had with him on his blog earlier this year (which you can read here).

It’s not terribly enlightening to go through my argument there in much more detail: my point is abundantly obvious, as is the rather pathetic way Kraig immediately directs the conversation away from the substance of my post and onto irrelevant, distractionary nonsense (in this case, equivocating on the meaning of a common word and then trying to turn the discussion into speculation about *me* and not engagement with my *arguments*).

Feel free to read through our exchange. My final post of the exchange – rejected by Kraig – will be published below.

But first I wanted to take this opportunity to point out a trend I’ve noticed among religious believers online: they seem to have an aversion to an open discussion of their claims and are quick to shut down discussion (or simply prohibit it outright).

Read on for more.

Go Mitt in Your Hat: Reflections on the Election

Discussing politics is largely a game, one played by people who have the luxury to devote time to it. Like most games, discussing politics can be fun but doesn’t really have any effect on the world. Hell, the actual electoral process itself has only a slight effect. At the end of the day, here in modern America at least, the “choice” offered to voters is usually between candidates who are, in the big picture, remarkably similar. No matter who wins, very little is likely to change in the fundamentals of the system. For me personally, the outcome one way or the other doesn’t really affect how I carry out my True Will, so politics isn’t exactly a pressing issue.

That being said, it can be fun to talk about politics, especially when these Republican clods select the most odious “suit” possible to represent them and have their candidate (along with their dumbass, harmful policies) rejected by the country.

There’s an old Simpsons joke featuring banners at the conventions of the two main American political parties. The Republican banners read, “We’re just plain evil!” and “We want what’s worst for everybody!” and the Democrat banners read, “We hate life and ourselves!” and “We can’t govern!”

For those who dip their heads down to play the (relatively meaningless) game of political discussions, that joke pretty much sums up the playing field. It’s amazing that a joke made twenty years ago is even more relevant today than it was then.

It's also more than a bit disconcerting (once again, relatively speaking from here within "the game") how many American conservatives -- and especially Republican politicians -- seem not only misinformed but positively allergic to facts. Comedian Bill Maher provided a chuckle-worthy take on the phenomenon of the Republican "bubble" here.

Anyway, before this Romney character rides off into the footnotes of history, I wanted to share these links that I found entertaining:

A well-written and insightful review of Mitt Romney's book, written by a fellow Simpsons fan, as witnessed by the great quote that heads the entry.

An amusing parody of Gangnam Style ("Mitt Romney Style") by the folks at College Humor.

Autumnal Equinox

To Autumn (by William Blake)

 

O Autumn, laden with fruit, and stainèd
With the blood of the grape, pass not, but sit
Beneath my shady roof; there thou may'st rest,
And tune thy jolly voice to my fresh pipe,
And all the daughters of the year shall dance!
Sing now the lusty song of fruits and flowers.

`The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust'ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather'd clouds strew flowers round her head.

`The spirits of the air live on the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.'
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat;
Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.

 

 

 

Yeah, I'm posting this a day late. What's it to ya?

I'm struck, on reading this over, by the way this poem positions Autumn's "lusty" song as central, only to absent him in the last line.

The structure of the poem is anticipation of Autumn and his song (stanza 1), the song of Autumn (stanzas 2 and 3), and the departure of Autumn (stanza 3). [None of Blake's other season poems have this structure] The song of Autumn -- the centerpiece -- can't be contained by the form of the poem: the song spills over the constraints of form (organically, we might say) from one stanza to the next, though it breaks neatly on the period of a syntatical sentence.

That is to say, a reader may think that the song is over when it continues abruptly in the next stanza.

Autumn departs in the final line, leaving his surplus: the harvest, the beautiful sights, sounds, and smells of autumn, and his poetry.

Autumn is an ever-present absence, the tokens of something fleeting, something evermore about to be, and its omnipresence spills out into our experience in ways that no human form can fully capture, not even the "fresh pipe" of a skilled poet (though no doubt such a "pipe" will have no end of activity in celebrating the "lusty" song Autumn leaves in his wake). Unlike the other season poems, there are no other humans: the speaker makes no mention of "we" or "our" as he does in the first two season poems. There are only the "daughters of the year." All is fading now, including the speaker, who will be left alone with Winter in "To Winter." But what remains is a "golden load."

It's difficult to read this poem and not think of James Joyce reading it, giggling at the phrase "golden load": his HCE in Finnegans Wake also departs and leaves in his wake a "golden load" for the rest of us. And quite aside from any scatalogical jokes we may want to make, this "load" is also the cosmic egg, the nourishing breakfast left for us, all the horses, by the fall of a cosmic humpty dumpty, "iggs for the brekkers come to mourn-him, sunny side up with care."

There is almost certainly a Fall from the Garden of Eden reference in here as well. We start with the blood of grapes (foreshadowing the necessity of communion), Autumn references "modest Eve" (summoning the thought of both evening and the character from Genesis), and then he departs (the fall from the Garden?).

If what he has left behind is a "golden load," it might well be that Blake is -- like Joyce -- referencing the felix culpa, the "fortunate fall," the Christian view that the fall was a good thing, for it necessitated the greater good of redemption. Or, to paraphrase St. Paul, sin boldly, for it will elicit even greater mercy from God. Or, to put it into Thelemic terms, our "fall" into individual consciousness necessitates the greater good (and the greater enjoyment and fulfillment) of our union with Nuit through our union with the Khabs, the True Self, the True Inclinations.

There’s a lot that could be said here about the radical political implications of Blake’s subversion of poetic form (this was written at the beginning of his career as a poet, long before he *really* began exploding poetic form, as he would in the 1790s and especially the 1800s: the child is the father of the man, as always). There’s also a lot to say about the sexuality of this poem in its eighteenth-century context. And there’s also, aside from the Garden of Eden stuff, an echo of Milton’s Lycidas in the third stanza.

A lot going on, as always with Blake.

Happy Fall.

(Get it? Happy Fall?)

 

The Problem with Platitudes II: It's All Subjective!

Some people are excessively enamored of the fact that reality can only be experienced subjectively. It leads them to draw all kinds of goofy conclusions, among them one of the most laughable canards awaiting a serious student of Thelema: “Since everything is subjective, nobody has any ultimately correct answers.”

In practice, people who spout this stupid saying often acknowledge that people can indeed have correct answers about reality (“Look out! There’s a brick wall over there!”). But they often dismiss these answers as the products of “consensus reality” or a “shared reality” that we can speak broadly about but that comes apart at the seams when we discuss the particulars of a single individual’s experience. Thus, while consensus reality may not accept the existence of psychic powers, magic, spirits, ghosts, and the like, since reality is ultimately subjective, an individual’s subjective experience – such as, for example, seeing a ghost – can vary from that of the consensus. Thus, the consensus has no monopoly on the correct answer of whether there’s a ghost or not.

This approach is, however, simply a device for maintaining delusion, and it is the purpose of this post to explore the flaws of this platitude and exactly how it hinders individual progress.

Read on for more

Gems from the Forums VI: Invocation

Over at lashtal.com, a poster took me up on details of his practices and explanations of them (which you can read here. In his post, he made the following comment about invocation, a subject that I had not mentioned at all in my post on practices:

Occasionally I perform invocations or other "magical" ceremonies [...] I perform this kind of "magic" because I understand the cabalistic principles to represent certain aspects of my psyche. When I need access to, or balancing in one principle or another, these practices help my mind to change gears. To move more in the directions I would like it to.

In my response to him, I discuss the purpose of Invocation, and – once again close reading Crowley’s words – show how ceremonies of invocation are, in Crowley’s words, a “symbolic technicality” that conceals a method for distinguishing between what a person is and what he fondly imagines himself to be (i.e. a method of discovering the True Will).

Read on for the bulk of my post, with one substantial revision at the end.

The Problem with Platitudes

“Spiritual” books, teachers, and groups – particularly the execrable “New Age” movement – typically present seekers with no end of platitudes: pithy expressions of so-called wisdom that are often accepted uncritically by these seekers, who usually have never been taught to properly evaluate claims (or, indeed, why they should even bother evaluating claims).

A new series of posts (“The Problem with Platitudes”) will examine some of these phrases.

Make no mistake: uncritically accepting these fortune-cookie sayings is absolute poison to any real attainment. This series of posts aims to explore exactly what’s wrong with these platitudes and exactly how they impede progress.

First up: the classic canard, “Everyone’s opinion (or belief) is equally correct.”

This phrase – far from being “wisdom” – is a lie that, if accepted, will make it almost impossible for the individual to gain a clear picture of reality (and thus impossible for an individual to attain in the Thelemic system).

Read on for more.