OR
How a little girl brought life to puppets of sawdust brains and rag hearts.
Happy Birthday Greta, Welcome to 17 !!!
Epiphany 2020, The Judgment of an Æon
“Gabriel used careful language when he announced his birth. He did not speak of ‘what will be born in you‘ to avoid the impression that a body would be introduced into her womb from outside; he spoke of ‘what will be born from you,’ so that we might know by faith that her child originated within her and from her.” (italics in the original)
Saint Athanasius, bishop
Office of Readings, January 1
This Epiphany, the year XX XX, the beetle completes is long, dangerous and torturous journey through the sinister moon of poison and lies. While the world continues to blow its trumps towards war, we offer our humble gift of an alternative. A song of Joy. Do not be “freaked out in a moon age day dream” any longer. This is how we all meet the Lady of the Virginal Moon, enthroned Queen of Heaven. Defeating the gates of hell, sealing the abyss, she becomes Empress with the help of the Hierophant. Mother of the Church, Mother of the faithful, all those who believe in the value of life over death.
Mindful ecology cuts right to the reality of our molecular world. What we find in the contemplative disciplines is that for the human being it is their relationship with their own personal father and mother that uncovers the basic foundations of our characters and the bodily set of ecstasies and pains that are uniquely ours. In a mystery our consciousness rides on a set of associations around creativity and death that are also associations of the heart: fatherhood and motherhood. In our innermost we are not most moved by the impersonal forces of the universe but the ongoing relationships with the molecular makers who play the hand of God for us on this earth.
Who am I? My DNA is a combination of my mothers and my fathers as they lived and loved over generations. One flesh, one family of Man. To honor it is the only reasonable reaction to a gift earned by so many before us through countless hardships untold. Our ancestors, like ourselves, were willing to suffer to hold the flaming hope that we pass through the centuries: that our children will come to live in a more peaceful and just world. Today, after the age of cynicism to use Kung’s term from Does God Exist?, it is hard for most people to find a rational hope that where this whole planetary experience is leading us is anywhere good. The work of the blackstar is one that re-establishes a basis for exactly that, a realistic basis. At first glance it is going to seem very pie in the sky but it is in fact all about boots on the ground.
In The Lord of the Rings when Frodo first meets Aragorn he says “I think a Servant of the enemy would look finer and feel fouler.” This, I do believe, gets right to the heart of the matter. This crisis the race is facing right now is one I hope to illustrate using a comparison of cults and culture. The cults are the Mormons started by Joseph Smith and the Ordo Temple Orientis started by Aleister Crowley. Everyone knows the commercial images the Mormons sustain in the popular culture of clean shaven white families beaming in their no-drinking, no-smoking happiness. Here the cover of the book looks most inviting, virtuous even. The OTO, on the other hand, has a very different reputation. The virtues of the OTO seem nothing more than sex, drugs, and rock and roll but what I propose is that we look under the covers a bit. Literally.
Joseph Smith, like Aleister Crowley, was a type of ceremonial magician. He used rituals and divine names seeking occult power. I think both were also seeking by these means healing for spiritual wounds inflicted upon them through torturous childhoods. It goes with the territory. People who are not deeply involved in these things think otherwise about all things related to private ritual practice but they should be careful not to judge too quickly what they are not personally called to understand. It is in symbolism that the young victims of child abuse can find their way to defeat the suicidal and / or murderous impulse injected in them through the nail of their personal crucifixions; whatever it is that actually happened to them. On the other hand evil does have a way of spreading. . . even multiplying. Eventually I will be arguing that one of the evidences for a demonic reality is the way in which the human evil we choose to do, often with a large dose of ignorance and driven by drives we experience as suddenly overwhelmingly powerful, has its cruelty multiplied way out of proportion to the crime committed. Cain slays his bother and soon we have so many nuclear weapons pointed at each other that no sane person should be sleeping well at night. The point here is this, the cults that feed on and pass on many of the symbol sets we have labeled occultism are in fact sources of pestilence, places jackals feed; the serial killers, child slaughterers, and other wicked ones. They can also be places of healing at the hands of prophets, shamans turned shepherds if you will. 2020 is a good year to look at this type of discernment, the discernment of spirits. Both religion and science have been found to be capable of unspeakable wickedness accompanied by deception covering it up but these same fields are also capable of producing a type of saintly genius that through soul-struggles provides a selfless service to the world. The question our race is face to face with just now is how do you identify fair from foul in the these two realms of science and religion.
“Our method is science, our aim is religion.” Motto of the A∴A∴
The science of Man is coming to terms with the fact that through certain chemical enhancements, IF given in the right religious set and setting, profoundly powerful experiences are available that point to there being some reality behind the reports of shamans and mystics throughout the Aeons. This suppressed knowledge, that psychedelics have this potential, has become more or less mainstream. I find it significant that as the year 2020 begins 11 states (yep, 11) in the ol’ U.S. of A. have declared marijuana legal. This science is also confronting the dark side revealed by the same psychedelics in which a bad trip involves visions of a future world with cities all burning under the rain of unleashed bombs with vampire-like monsters from between the stars feeding on the souls in the debris. The psychedelic voyagers of the 1960s learned, often the very hard way, that there was this vision of burning flesh that had to be dealt with too, but it was all so new. We owe them and the few brave explorers who went before them on their “trip to the East” at least our gratitude. Many paid with their lives and sanity so that we might be able to more sanely make up for the painful deficit in our own culture today. Protestant fear of religious contemplatives made bliss a verboten subject for hundreds of years now. We Chapel people with our beads and our real belief in the supernatural really spooked folks but such fears are now displaced. The Puritan fear of ecstasy is a lie. It is born of the schismatics trying to make sense of Jesus after refusing his flesh and blood.
The other science of Man that cannot be reversed is the insight we have gained into the role of bonding and attachment in the nurturance of both the body and soul of the young. We are mammals par excellence so an environment of safety, or a lack of the same, is the vital determining factor in the creation of traumatic stress syndromes. It is not events in themselves that cause one person to suffer their whole life long while another who had the same thing happen to them does not. It is the setting in combination with the set, the different internal and external environmental factors influencing the psyche of the child at the time that makes all the difference. If the child anywhere hears a voice of love carrying human dignity and directed directly towards them, they are likely to make it. This is what Mr. Rogers understood so very well. If a child even sees a Man walking in righteousness it can undo hundreds of encounters with the Men who, after all, carry the burdens of incest, rape, and war. Modern trauma studies have reached the edge of science where the spirit leaves the body in the so-called out of body experience. There is no further tracking from the point of view of the personality involved. Trauma studies, like the psychedelic ones, have run straight into the reality of the demonic in which very personal cruelties reach dimensions of poltergeist and other phenomenon. As these therapists learned to say when they were just beginning to uncover the connections, dealing with a dark child’s trauma is like waking a tiger, or lion if you will.
These are the sciences that deal directly with what holds the most promise for Man to overcome the evil festering among us today and planning our demise through planet poisoning and nuclear fires. The aim is religion. As so meticulously documented by William James more than a century ago there is a more or less universal form of spiritual experience, conversion from sin by encounter with mercy. It is a moment of grace, it is given from above and no man, woman, or child can make it happen for themselves or for another. What then are we to do? The A∴A∴ tradition believes we should still work at it, prepare for it. It is in recognition of these two factors this whole approach is built: the role of sciences in the mind of a modern educated human being and yet recognizing their limit. Mindfulness means to work to carefully discern the spirits, to find the truth, to seek as the Magi of old the One Star in Sight. . . to separate the fair from the foul. All the sciences from biology and ecology through to astrophysics and Bayesian A.I. are important to study, it is just that the sciences around the use of psychedelics in ritual settings and the reaction of the body to trauma are the ones formerly kept underground and need what light thrown on them we can.
“Our aim is religion.” The path is not one of superstition and magical thinking. The path is one of science.
Which brings us back to the subject at hand between cult and culture. The Tarot cards above are from the Rider Waite and Thoth decks. If you want to play along acquire a copy of each and spend some time considering the meaning of the changes made in the Thoth cards as lessons learned. In the old Fool card, for example, the youth was blindly about to walk straight into the abyss of demons. In Lady Harris’ version the Fool faces you straight on and you see the lion eating at his thigh. To put the differences between the two decks in a nutshell, how is this? There is an adjustment to justice involved in the judgment of an aeon that so seriously misused the powerful symbolism of the Lord Jesus Christ, turning our human dignity and glory, beauty and truth, love and compassion into Darwinian robots rutting like pigs in lust. How many cult leaders used the name of Christ to seduce the young and married? Or to whip up mob violence in a great fear of the other, of the devil in your neighbor and the Scarlet Woman? We see those sexually perverted spokesmen for Jesus represented in David Bowie’s Blackstar video by the regressed human beings on the cross. Forgiveness starts by naming the sin.
Behind the Mormon pictures of happy families, blissfully happy families, there is a set of theological teachings. It is their assertion that they and they alone have the proper interpretation of Christ’s teachings. All other people who have ever followed him, if they adhered to the Apostolic Creed became lost souls. They will remain so unless they accept the Mormon baptism being offered the dead in their temple rituals. The real meaning of Christ teaching, according to their own published works, is hard to actually see for what it is. It can be hard to see the forest for the trees. Many people are familiar with the result of the theology. Mormons do not share the core community building ritual of marriage with the rest of us, they exclusively do those ceremonies only in their temples. This is a form of sex magic. The other well known feature of their culture that comes directly from this ceremony is the special underwear they are to wear at all times. It is first put on after their temple rites and is designed to keep them from sharing their spiritual gifts with the surrounding culture which they consider evil through and through. For them the non-Mormon government of the United States is a temporary stepping stone towards the theocracy to be established when the new Zion is placed in Missouri because the Vatican, the existing Zion for us of the ancient Christian faith, will no longer exist nor, most likely, will most of the Middle East. Then the world will be remade the way Jesus wants it to be. This is Darby Dispensationalism made political to immanentize the eschaton.
What is the theology that bears this fruit? A justification of jus primae noctis (right of kings to a maid’s first night) at best, a justification of incest obviously and at worst of pedophilia as their “heavenly father” is very often referred to as the Ancient of Days. Christians of the creed define the Heavenly Father as a Spirit so that the term for them means something else. This is not mentioned to scandalize but to address the witness given by Martha Beck in Leaving the Saints. Let us take this one step at a time. For Mormons God the Father has a physical body just exactly like you or I except it is glorified. Joseph is vowed to Mary as husband to wife. Joseph is the son of this Mormon Father who had previously created his spirit by having intercourse with his “heavenly” bride. The Christmas story in Mormon theology involves the Father coming to earth to take the bride of his son and have carnal sex with her to create Jesus. The sacred Christian mystery is, for them, polygamous incest. It is nothing new. The ancient Egyptians took the evil of incest and called it their good too. Of course an angel of destruction came and destroyed all their first born in return while God used Moses to call good people out of that evil and in the Decalogue laid the cultural seeds that destroyed the superstitions that had maintained the Pharaohs in power for thousands of years. Never again would incest be openly worshiped as the way to elevate human families as star gods, ascending up the Ziggurnat Tower of Babel, pretending to control the universe by building pyramidal mausoleums in defiance of the great taboo. It is still not openly allowed. Mormons need to hide the plain implications of their words and Donald Trump has had to remain with insinuations in his early days scandalizing the jaded New York scene.
This Christmas at my mother-in-law’s I heard this lame attempt at humor: ‘Mary was just the first woman to have a documented affair. She was wedded to Joseph at the time and there was a baby right?’ This gets right to the heart of the matter does it not? Who do you say that Mary was? What if you are wrong, have you not then just insulted God’s mother, a God in the form of Man whom we are taught has all the passions of love for one’s mother that this entails. In the book of St. John’s Revelation we meet the righteous anger of the Christ that closes the abyss on the devil and his angels for all time once and for all. There is a certain type of anger involved in exorcisms. The damnation of the damnable is an event that has already taken place through the victory of love on the cross witnessed to by the Resurrection. This is what the symbolism of the apocalyptic book is teaching. Properly understood it returns the reader to the fist page of the Bible, not out to strange star gods. For our world to return to the ways of politicians having magical power because they dare to break the incest taboo is a cultural and spiritual regression for our race. To get caught up in it is to turn your back on reason and science, not just virtue and compassion. We are not destined to return to the jungle but to journey ever onward towards the city of peace. Horus is the avenger of regression in Mr. Crowley’s scroll.
The same spirit of viciousness that is in the Via Dolorosa is also in the act of incest. The soul of the victim of incest, and they are victims, is what will accompany them all the rest of their days. They will take to their graves souls altered – beyond their own power to heal. Now this is important. It is in this sense that the crime of incest can stand in for all the abuses that are so sever in the torture they inflict on a persons self image and self worth that they cause life long traumatic reactions and suffering. This is what the perpetrator of these crimes takes in their hands, this temporary thrill of sex used as revenge physically and emotionally. “There is love and there is love.” Twisted expressions of “love” are always rooted in the human heart that has not been able to forgive.
Not one of us can judge another. Virtue is not measured in absolutes that we can see, though we know that ultimately absolutes exist. If you doubt it watch and consider Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. How far a person comes in their fight against their own demons is what will count in the end. We know this through the Judgment of the Aeon and what we have learned about a civilization that chose to worship money at the expense of the earth. This is a way of saying the unchanging truth about the human condition: true forgiveness comes from the heart. It is very, very arduous to achieve and can only be accomplished with the aid, in the end, of a higher power. “Judge not, that you not be judged.” This applies to every person you have ever or will ever meet in the flesh. They deserve honor and respect even if they are currently in the deepest of evils for we do not know what tomorrow will bring for them, or for ourselves. We of the faith, hope and charity party believe one thing with all the strength of reason backed by evidence and it is this: God will bring good out of evil for those who turn to him. It is a mystery of time involving what affects the ripples of our activities have on others in the long run, a mystery the author of the reality of history alone is master of. Not only is God more than capable enough of bringing good out of evil but the good is often in proportion to the evil! It is from great sinners that great saints are made, it is the lukewarm that are spit out of His mouth (Rev 3.16) For us the Lord really has taken away the sin of the world. For those who turn to Him in goodwill the world can be turned upside down to make things right. You have to believe in the magick to see it, though once you do see it the evidence for it is undeniable. More prosaically, you need to know what you are looking for to find it. There is supernatural power in the forgiveness of sins and the gates of hell do not prevail against it.
This is the dagger that was used in the ceremonial magic of the Joseph Smith family. Most scholars believe the “personages” he reports seeing were invoked with such rites. It is known as the Mars dagger.
As converts to Catholicism formerly trained as students of magics and yogas we find the magical engine behind the Mormon phenomenon to be fairly basic, ceremonial magic 101. The core of ceremonial magic is found in the circle of protection the magician is to inhabit and the triangle of evocation where the spirit being summoned appears. Around the circumference of the circle the magician writes, very carefully because the protection of his soul depends on it, the names of God. The tales of demons getting the circle broken so they can enter and attack are many. The reality of what is going on is nowhere more detailed than in Liber 418 by Mr. Crowley. To cause a curse instead of a blessing all that one needs to do is destroy the outer ring of sacred, protective names. This will allow what the tales call demonic possession, or at least an attempt at it, to occur. This is exactly what the second Egyptian facsimile in the Mormon Doctrine and Covenants does.
In this battle the angels are on the side of the Stele of Revealing.
We square the circle, restore the names
Sealed in the abyss from which it came.
It Is Done.
It can Knot be Undone.
The second image is the Hypocephalus of Sheshonq, a magical amulet placed at the back of the head of a mummy so that their spirit could be properly guided through the underworld. The back of the head is Qoph in Hebrew and related to the sinister Moon Tarot mentioned elsewhere. Cranial Sacral therapists and those investigating the role of the vagus nerve add interesting evidence that this is a very important area when dealing with some of the deepest traumas that bodies can absorb. The Egyptian believer placed the hieroglyphic names of their gods around the rim of the circle. Hieroglyphs were considered a sacred script, exactly like Hebrew would later be considered among the Jewish people. In the Mormon version however Joseph Smith replaced missing parts with letters from the non-sacred hieratic script. This mishmash of sacred and profane is an image of the magic circle broken open. Any well trained magician would tell you that in its current form this bit of “reformed Egyptian” is a gate, not a guard. It acts as a source of pestilence, a spiritual point from which the polygamous incest’s spirit of viciousness can be fed by their rites by spirits they believe to be of the dead and unleashed into the world. Such, anyway, is the assessment and analysis from an informed occult point of view. This is not to say this is what is happening, only that this is what an objective look at the material shows.
However, there is the important witness of the daughter of the Mormon scholar who did the most to justify this image to the world. It was no small scholarly sell-out to find means of tying obvious mistakes of translation with the Spirit of the Lord as it is revealed in the Gospels. The resulting Mormon publication is a mind-numbing mishmash of footnotes to real and imagined references. Martha Beck, the witness who mentions this is best left to speak for herself (pgs 113, 147):
“I am five years old, my hands are tied, and my father is doing something that feels as though it’s ripping me in two. I am stretched out on my back, legs spread, like a frog on a dissecting table, unable to see or understand what is happening, focusing as hard as I can on the cord around my hands, because it distracts me from what is happening elsewhere. A rush of strange words bounce around my head, words my father is saying: Father Abraham. The Book of the Dead. The Book of Breathings. The prophet Joseph. Amut the Destroyer. The prophet Joseph Smith. Sacrifice. Abrahamic sacrifice. I have a dim idea that my father has been commanded to sacrifice Isaac. None of it makes sense.”
“In another dream, which tortured me throughout my adolescence, I would think I’d woken up, then hear slow, heavy footsteps creaking on the floorboards outside my room. Just as I decided it was nothing, the doorway would fill, top to bottom and side to side, with the probing head of a huge crocodile, atop a tawny body that seemed to belong to a dog. The stench of stagnant water and death shriveled the air around it as the monster walked heavily, inexorably toward me, and there was nowhere I could run. Then I’d wake up.”
The image of the scholar-magician was first made popular in its current form during the Renaissance. Many who take up the practice today are still inspired by the image of a devoted religious scholar in search of contact with angels. Literature plays a fundamental role in passing on the spiritual teachings of the magi. In literature while we often find the wise man able to properly initiate the young one through his magical training, think Merlin and Gandalf. We also find that there is a darker side. There is a pact with the devil hanging in the wings. From Dr. Marlowe to Faust authors have explored what lies beneath the religious exterior of the magical character. This makes these tales very relevant for our times in which scandal has befogged everyone and everything. Beneath the religious exterior these authors find mingling with the Dark Arts is secretly covering up base power and pleasure seeking. These lesser motives live like a worm in the apple, rotting the core of all practices offered as replacements of Catholicism’s ancient and sacred liturgy. Such, anyway, is the witness of the majority of the source literature.
Just as there is no farther to go in human “psychology” than causing the ejection of the spirit via an imagination-on-fire OOBE via torture, so there is no further to go in our private or collective ritual capacity than the highest, that is, most true and most proper worship for our Age. Priest and Pope alike, layman and laywoman alike, all should kneel before their maker. Everything else is liable to the superstitious magic of clericalism, the power of the Pharisee’s targeted by Christ’s scorn. This is the ancient teaching, that all other strange gods are liars that enslave those who worship them because through such worship they show they have failed to discern the distinction between the creator and the creation. Catholicism holds up the Sacred Host and invites all to join us in contemplative awe before it. We just do not believe in the Evangelical beat-stick missionary approach. We seek to shine with charity and mercy by our immersions in the boundless love of God we experience in the most intimate union imaginable. The theology of Catholicism is that of God giving Himself in the flesh, blood, soul, and divinity of His being so perfectly and completely to the human race – a star-man come to show earth-man how to reach heaven, as it were – that the truth of His revelation is now, post-Crucifixion, written like a scroll on our flesh, like a law on our hearts.
However, this is all turned into nonsense if we do not involve the mystery of time. The temptation to holier-than-thou then becomes overwhelming.
What is the orthodox teaching about the mystery of time? Or, to put it another way, why does Christianity insist on the historical reality of mankind’s savior, thereby grounding its “myths” in reality as we mortals normally know it? Why teach both the Resurrection of the body at the end of time and the perfect union of the soul of saints with God within time but a time that is a reality not at all like mortals normally know it. St. Paul insisted he had traveled to the third heaven, that is what he left us about what happened to him on the road to Damascus. Some scholars have supposed he was referring to a Gnostic like set of exaltations or perhaps an early chariot mysticism or some such reference. Yet isn’t it the third coming of the Lord that he is teaching us? In the first coming, the Alpha of His Time, the creator of the universe changed a DNA molecule so that a virgin conceived. In the Omega of His Time, just before his death the creator of the universe changed bread and wine molecules so that disciples in love with their Lord might know perfect union. This simple yet profound gesture from the supernatural world into ours was sealed by what Christianity has always insisted was a factual ressurection sworn to by many eyewitnesses of upright character. In what has become known as the second coming the one who was crucified returns alive to judge the living and the dead “and His kingdom will have no end” because it is in the time beyond time. Only after all of time has unfolded will we be able to see how all the interconnections of what we call good and evil have in-fact played out but the God of the Bible was, is, and will always be beyond and above time itself. He created it, created in Gen 1.1 “the beginning.” The final important bit of orthodoxy is in how the coming of the Lord is said to occur in the Fullness of Time, being born in Bethlehem and tortured to death under Pontius Pilate. But what about between the time of his coming centuries ago and the end of all time in the universe aeons hence? This is where and how the third coming of the Lord takes place. It takes place every time a lost sinner is found and every time the priest at the altar pronounces the words of consecration.
Those who have yet to meet the Living Lord are, we could say in light of the Biblical revelations about sacred time, living in the age or aeon before the Fullness of Time. There is a much used prayer in the Eucharistic rite that states that “in ages past you spoke to your people through the prophets and now, in the fullness of time, have spoken to all people through your son.” The sinner unrepentant is how Catholicism sees any human being who has yet to be given the grace leading to repentance and conversion, a lost sheep, they whom the Christ came to save. They are living in the age of the prophets. The church prays every morning for them, “Today listen to the voice of the Lord, do not grow stubborn as your fathers did in the wilderness.” No sin is too great and no sinner too hopeless as long as breath remains in the body. If they harden not their hearts when He calls they will hear the Word of the true prophets and through them they will come to hear the true Word of the Lord. This is the third coming of the Lord. It is the coming in glory in the human heart. It is also the coming in glory St. John’s Revelation is mostly about. Revelations is not a set of sacred tea leaves as-if the Age of prophecy had not actually been replaced by the Age of the Son. It has nothing, nothing, to do with The Late Great Planet Earth crowd’s reading of the sacred scripture in America’s Republican headlines.
Instead of tea leaves, we suggest, this is part of the mystery of time that the psychedelic experience makes so vivid. Note I did not say it is the same thing. That would be speculating beyond the evidence. What can be said definitively after decades of both legal and underground research is that there are available to human beings some states of consciousness that seem to overwhelmingly witness to extraordinary profundities involved in our journeys through the space-time continuum. Terminal patients have been known to lose their fear of death and life long alcoholics reform from single experiences of these moments. While set and setting cannot be ignored neither can what the theologians call natural law, that there is a ladder of light, as it were, within us. We did not make the ladder and it is not ours to shaped and climb anyway we wish. Those who think they can end up mad or worse. From these studies it can said that our consciousness seems to consist of an ongoing interpenetration of finite, linear time with the eternity which surrounds it and before which, as the ancient hymn has it, “let all mortal flesh keep silence.” The DNA is deathless after a fashion, life only ever knowing one chromosomal combination after the other. Yet every vehicle of that DNA is not at all deathless. That is another way to discuss the interpenetration of finite and infinite factors within our flesh as it is reflected in our minds.
I have quickly tried to compare and contrast the two theologies of Catholicism and Mormonism both as cult and culture. How the OTO itself functions can be explained easily enough. For those who have said in their hearts evil be my good, not to rebel in a murderous rampage but because early torture provided evidence for such a view, they provide a means of encountering God who wears the mask of the devil. In the OTO Baphomet specifically. It is funny how someone will lie all day in church but not dare lie in front of an image of him. Contrast the Tarot lovers depicted in bondage to the devil in the Rider Wait image with the devil in Lady Harris’ work. Be very careful if you dare to engage in throwing scandal about. Ah, but how what looks foul. . . “He is foul enough!” Merry replies to Frodo’s assessment of Strider.
“In this world, its hard to tell the shadow from the light
what is real can find a way to hide behind the lies.”
Lead with your heart, The Tenors
ABRA * HAM
ABRA * MELIN
ABRA*HAD*ABRA
Mormons, come home to Rome, you’ve been had.
