Announcements from
Lodge Members and Officers

    SUNDAZE- Jurgenmass April first, AethyrMass on the 29th; the 8th, 15th, and 22nd are all Liber 15 (but look out for the Deacon's fave Saint!) All these Masses start at 8 pm... the Taurus BDay Smash at 4:18 the 29th.
    MEETINGS- Lodgemeeting April 3rd at 8 pm; planning Beltane-By-The-Sea and May diversions. The Rose-Croix and Lodge-O-Perfection meet on the 19th. (And those Secretive folk just realised they're NOT...)
    INITIATIONS- Minervals at Midnight April 7th, First and Second Degrees April 21st; call a day before/that day for info if you can get thru -

CLASSES-
    BILL'S Qabalah continues with Binah and Chokmah on the 11th and 18th; both at the Lodge with slides & pillows and MORE DATA than Any brain but Bill's can process at one gulp...
    DAVE'S Enochian Krew is still studying the sublime and supremely sacred septagram Sigillum Dei AEmeth at 7:30 Tuesdays the 17th and 24th...#'s 4 & 5 of a 7-part series.
    ANDREW did not reach the Columnist by presstime- Shiatsu fans, watch the fridge.
    NEFERTITI Camp will run "History Night" at the Lodge April 25th starting at 7:30pm.

    There's a May Calendar at the back of this Newsletter (and it's not FINAL yet) for the futurejunkies - the government will STEAL an hour on April 1st and order us to set our clocks FORWARD - and where has the rest of "The Tempest" gone?

    Thus it came that as the aeons crept or fled the spirit grew;
    Out of elemental substance foamed the hot and potent brew.

    Foamed and spewed in theurgic rhythm, roared a thundering litany;
    Molded from its psychic forces our enshrined epiphany!

    Stood our pantheon incarnate vesting full the Will of Man,
    Glowing in its royal splendor, filling the imperial plan.

    So in triumphal procession march the Lords of Karnak back
    Tie their wounds and burn their dead before their bloody arms they stack.

    As in wild and joyous revelry carillon and cymbals ring
    Giving homage to our chosen Gods and glory to our King.

    For on the littered plain this day was cleared an ancient wrong
    The infidels were made to pay and yield unto the strong.

    Yea, ruthless as the cleansing sea we crush the Christian might
    And now they lie enslaved before our revered Gods of Night!

    What mortal man can do to Man they did unto our sires
    But we, immortal, gathered strength from sacrificial fires.

    Reincarnated stand the host that bridged the gulfs of time
    Avenging what the Church of Rome had poisoned in its prime!

(first published in The Grady Project #2, December 1987 e.v.)

    "Lucifer" --- Not to be confused with the Christian deity of the same name. Many Latin scholars have a certain disquietude over the use of "Lucifer", "Lightbearer" as a name for the Christian Devil. Some Renaissance writers replaced this term with "Lucifuge", "Lightfearer". In the context here, "Lucifer" signifies all deities of rebirth, renewal and especially light: Lugh, Ahuramazda, Prometheus, Marduk, Be'al, Persephone, Sophia, Venus, Osiris, Jehovah and the ancient concept of Christ. Sadly, over the centuries many Christians have taken to worshiping their "Devil" under the name of "Jesus" and denouncing their "Christ" under the name of "Lucifer". After bearing false witness against the beliefs of others so long, these misguided people have come to attribute the doings of their "devil" to their "saviour" and the deeds of their "Jesus" to those of their "Lord of Lies". To break one commandment is to break all of them sooner or later. To bear false witness against the deities of others is to blaspheme one's own. --- Editor.

    Treasurer General
    Ordo Templi Orientis
    P.O.Box 430
    Fairfax, CA 94930 USA

    This is a Qabalistic way of seeing the creation of the universe and the beginning of all things. In it light is spoken of as though light were the essence of the Creator. This is necessary so that the human mind have something to fasten on, not because light or any other perceivable thing is truly the essence of the Most High.

    Let your mind calm itself. Send away all the cares of the day, dispatch all your concerns from their inmost places. Relax even the feelings of self and ego a little. For this is the place where such things had not yet come into being.
    Close your eyes and let a vision of warm and featureless light come upon you. In all directions there is a soft glow of brilliant light. Even the idea of direction is meaningless, for only the limitless light exists. Hold that for a bit.
    Within the vastness of the limitless light there is a sense of glowing. This is not separate but it is tangible. Light is about you like a thickness in the air. Soft and calm, bright and warm.
    Within the light a feeling of imminence grows. There is no change yet, but you feel that a change must occur. The light is featureless but it is about to move.
    Within you builds a feeling that something must be changed. It is not enough to be in a place of perfect limitless light. There must be difference. There must be a place within the infinite different from all else yet still of the infinite.
    The limitless light changes. Far off there is no change, the light extends away in featureless brilliance. Within you the light gathers to a greater brilliance, near about you the light dims. At the center of your being the light forms a brilliant smooth point of radiance while all the nearby light seems to flow in toward the center.
    When the point is firmly glowing within, there is an established darkness about you. Far off there is a great and distant shore of light, as bright as it was before the beginning of the universe.
    Thus is the universe begun, a point of self and being concentrated in the center, about the point a great expanse of outside and something else. Far away, a great sphere of light that is as true as the point within and as limitless as the beginning. This is the circle with a point inside, the symbol of the invisible sun and of Keter on the Tree of Life.

Parallel in Human Thought:

    When we are fully involved in doing, working and resting, it is as though there is no boundary between the world and the self. The trees bend their leaves to the same breeze that blows throughout all the world and moves the hair upon the head. This is the moment before creation. When something disturbs our revere, consciousness pulls back from oneness with the world and hides behind the eyes. Then the world with it's people, places and things is outside and the self is inside. Somewhere beyond what we see there is a knowing that all the world is one place, and we are one with it forever. Yet those things about us are separate seeming and perhaps even dangerous to the precious spark of ego that hides like a bright point behind the eyes.

    Let yourself relax. Return to a peaceful state. In the center of your being there is a bright point of pure brilliant light. About you is darkness, featureless darkness. At a great distance from you is a vast and perfect light like the point at your center. This is the form of pure existence, light gathered in a single point from surrounding space with infinite, limitless light beyond. The circle with a point at its center, the sphere of existence with the focus of the existing one at its center. Hold that image about yourself.
    From the distant and limitless light above you a single beam of light begins to descend down toward the point of brilliance within you.
    The beam becomes a line of light, slowly crossing the darkness toward you. You can see it now, approaching you from above, carrying with it a contact to the limitless light from before the beginning, from the eternity before the point of light that is your particular existence became separate from the vastness of the limitless light.
    The line of light touches the point of light and stops its evolution downward.
    You were alone in the silence. Now you are linked with the eternal light by a single line of light.
    All the essence of all that can ever be is drawn into that line of light from the head of it, the place where it emerges from the limitless light so far away. All that you shall ever know descends to you by that single brilliant chord across the vastness of the silence, the silence that was left behind when the light that it contained drew together into the point of brilliance that is you.
    The light of the line from infinity descends no farther. It is a touch of the All Existing that reaches only into you to embrace only you, to establish for you one path from the beginning infinite to the ending infinite that is your particular existence.
    This is the image of the great Sephira Chokmah on the Tree of Life, a vast sphere beyond which there is endless and undifferentiated light. A point of brilliance at the center of that sphere. A line of the same brilliant light, a radius to the sphere drawn from above to the center point.

Parallel in Human Thought:

    At times we dwell in solitude and see the world as though it was a thing wholly other, a thing apart, not of the self. Yet somewhere beyond that world is the greatness that holds all, the totality of existence that is one with the world and the self. In answer to this need, in consolation of this aloneness, a single awareness sometimes descends from the highest hope in the infinite. This ray of Truth passes through the great void of the outside world, lighting by its passage all the highest things in that world, showing that all the world draws its nourishment from the same root as the self. This line of thought and inspiration, this moment of mystic insight reaches from the infinite to the inside of the self. At the moment of its touching there is no more loneliness. There is enlightenment in the void. And the void is void only by comparison to the light.

    A point of light at your center, darkness all about you. At a great distance in all directions the same light that is concentrated at your center extends away to infinity. Hold that image.
    From above, a line of light descends toward the point of light at your center. Let that be the beginning of this meditation. Visualize the line of light as a thin beam reaching down from the luminous infinity far above.

    Within the line of light are strange shadows and brighter glowings. Patterns seem to appear and vanish inside it. Some of the patterns illuminate the darkness a little to either side and grant visions of other realities than your own.
    From dimly perceived images in the line of light, you form ideas and learn to see the elements of your own world. Below the bright point of light at your center is a vast darkness. Rays of light descend downward in imitation of the line of light. These gleamings are the efforts of your mind to penetrate the darkness. By their means the darkness is rendered less empty. One by one the glimmerings of thought find more and more tangible images in the darkness. The mind extends by stages of evolving awareness the patterns of the line of inspired light. These images grow with understanding, first being very dim, then having rational form, then becoming almost solid and at last having the appearance of matter. This is the way in which we learn about the outside. This is the beginning of discovery of form through exercise of Understanding.
    The gradual outward spread of that part of self called form and perception is the function of the Sephira Binah on the Tree of Life.

Parallel in Human Thought:

    When a new idea comes into the mind by inspiration or more outward instruction, at first that idea lays dormant. In time other abstract expressions of the new idea are seen. Later the new idea becomes a principle by which truth is discovered in the world. The idea becomes a tool, a power to shape and change the details of life. Finally objects come to embody the idea, and what came first as a flash of awareness in the mind becomes in its turn a thing of the senses.

    Four flames burn between heaven and earth. Four tongues of fire compose the Holy Name.
    Yod is a single radiant light in the darkness of beginning creation. From this light all knowledge radiates. Hay is a triple flame. One tongue of fire leaps upward. One tongue of
    fire burns across the sky. One small tongue of flame dances within the other two like the light in a lantern.
    Vau is an elongated flame seeking to dart upward.
    The last Hay is flame within flame, burning forever in the darkness.

    When the spirit of the Yod moved to create all things, it first darted three ways and formed the first Hay. This first Hay was like a window filled with too much light. The light grew until it burst open the window and sent sparks of ungraspable truth flashing into the night. The sparks are the stars in the sky and the unexpressed dreams of all who live in the world.
    Then the Yod extended itself gently downward. It formed the Vau with its careful light.
    The scattered sparks were gathered to form the second Hay after the pattern of the first.
    This second Hay became like a window with a curtain so that it could contain the light without burning the eyes of those who look to it for wisdom. The Vau gently entered the prepared place and illuminated the universe.

Parallel in Human Thought:

    When we first discover something new, the light of the discovery often blazes up in ecstasy and impossible hopes. This is like the Yod burning too brightly in the first Hay. Soon the new discovery burns away the new hopes and ecstasy passes into sadness and hopelessness.
    In time fragments of the new idea reappear like lesser inspirations. These do not lead to the great ecstasy of the first appearance of the new idea, but they are promising and full of hope in a lesser way.
    We become aware of ways to express the fragments of the new idea, ways that are possible and do not lead to the sadness of failure. From such things our life grows slowly and well.

Membership Growth based on Grand Lodge accounts at end of February 1990 e.v.

	2/88	2/89	2/90
DV Associates:	N/A	42	49
Paid Associates:	170	194	245
Minervals:	397	403	443
Ist Degrees:	236	358	380
IInd Degrees:	154	173	217
IIIrd Degrees:	97	109	145
IVth Degrees:	35	64	66
Vth Degrees:	40	49	63
Higher Degrees:	16	16	19
	====	====	====
Total members:	1,145	1,408	1,627

    Geographic distribution of known Associate and Initiate addresses:
    (by largest region and country. Sub regions over 110 subdivided)
    (From data available in March 1990)

Detail of February 1989 e.v. Demographics (last year)

Events Calendar for April 1990 e.v.

Projected Advance Events Calendar for May 1990 e.v.

    The viewpoints and opinions expressed herein are the responsibility of the contributing authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of OTO or its officers.

   Note to update: the addresses and phone numbers in these issues of the Thelema Lodge Calendars are obsolete since the closing of the Lodge. They are here for historic purposes only and should not be visited or called.

Thelema Lodge
Ordo Templi Orientis
P.O. Box 2303
Berkeley, CA 94702 USA

Phone: (510) 652-3171 (for events info and contact to Lodge)

Production and Circulation:
OTO-TLC
P.O.Box 430
Fairfax, CA 94978 USA

Internet: heidrick@well.com (Submissions and circulation only)